5 Birthdays She Doesn't Spend With Gregory House
by ellixian
Summary: A five-part series, though each chapter can be read on its own - snapshots of Cuddy on her birthday throughout the years she's known House.
1. or at least, he knows

It isn't the sharp chill of pavement against her bare skin that first rouses her from the bleariness of sleep. Nor is it the insistent whisper of night wind through her hair. She stirs, and mumbles something - a thought she can't quite grasp, a word she can't quite find - and tries to turn over.

But whatever - whoever - is nudging her in the ribs refuses to give up.

"Lisa."

She keens a little at her name, stretches and cracks open an eye. But it hurts too much to leave it open, and she closes it again to shut out the piercing darkness of a midwinter's night.

"Lisa," her name comes again, wrapped in the throaty rumble of a voice she thinks she knows, that she's heard above the noisy babble of a lecture hall, that has called to her from across a football field, that has flatly informed her that she was a moron for not getting the answer in the five minutes he'd given her to work out a problem.

"Mmmm," she protests, flinging out an arm to stave off the next nudge. "Leavemealone."

"Can't," is the curt response, as she feels his hand trace a surprisingly gentle path across her forehead, as she senses him lean closer to breathe her in. "You," he continues, as he slips his arms under her back and gathers her into him, "are remarkably unconscious and remarkably drunk. And an easy target for any frat boy who walks by with a hard-on and a case of beer in his system."

"Like you?" she replies lazily, tartly - she is always tart with him - as she tucks herself against the solid warmth of his body and loops her arms around his neck. "Mmmm," she hums against his chest. "WhereamI?"

"Passed out in the first quad," he replies, as he slowly gets to his feet. She giggles as the world sways away, as he takes a couple of steps to regain his balance.

"Where are your friends?" he asks her, not ungently, "I presume you still call them that, even after they abandoned you to the wolves tonight."

She's almost asleep again, rocked against his chest and cradled in his arms, the way she remembers her father once swooped her off the ground on a red-gold autumn morning and twirled her around, once, twice, before he called her _my darling_ for the last time.

"They wanted," she slurs sleepily, grabbing a handful of his t-shirt and burrowing further into his chest, "to go to another bar. I said... I said I wanted..." She yawns, eyes still closed, head still pleasantly fuzzy with just a hint of tightness around the edges.

"You unholy wench," he interrupts, and she knows without even having to look up that a smile is threatening to creep across his face. "You're lucky I came by when I did. Lying sprawled out like that in the middle of the quad - you _wanted _someone to take advantage of you, didn't you? "

"Nuh-uh," she mumbles as intelligently as she can, "not_someone_. Notjustanyone."

By this point, he has traced their way through the brick-lined campus paths to her dorm, and he rests their combined weight against the heavy metal door. "Almost home, Lise," he mutters into her hair as he fumbles a little, hops to regain his balance, and successfully gets them through the door.

"My hero," she says, not without a hint of pride, tightening her hold on his neck and nodding so that he can feel it.

"How much did you _drink_?" he asks as he climbs the steps two at a time, his long legs making short work of the flights of stairs. It's a smooth ride, she thinks idly as the haze in her mind lifts a little, and one she won't mind taking a few more times in her life.

"Not enough," she shoots back, "I'm still having this conversation, aren't I?"

He laughs then, easily, and she wonders why the sound goes straight to her gut and pools there, warmth and starlight and chocolate at once, and she decides it's because he laughs so rarely.

Finally, he is outside her door, and she lifts her head off his chest enough to crack both eyes open. She slams them shut against the dim light of the corridor - "Bright," she just manages to avoid whining - and he huffs a quick apology as he digs into her jeans pocket for her key.

"You should have come with us," she says, trying to keep the hint of reproach from her voice, as he artfully twists the key into the lock, wrenches the knob, and stumbles into the room with her. He somehow manages to flip the light on, so he can pick his way through the jumbled mess of clothes and books she's strewn across the floor while preparing for finals.

"Not my scene," he says immediately, moving over to her bed and sitting down on it, still holding her in his arms, and she could swear that, for just a second, he presses his lips against her hairline. A shiver entirely unrelated to the alcohol still whispering its way through her veins goes down her spine.

"I know," she sighs, and suddenly all she wants is to kiss that knowledge into the lines sketched across his face, into the shadows at the crook of his neck, into the veins that thread themselves across the back of his hands.

She's not sure if he holds her just that little bit tighter; she likes to think he did, but soon - too soon - he's shifting her off his lap and onto the bed, pulling the sheets right and the blanket tightly over her.

"You need to sleep it off," he tells her quietly, "and you know to drink more liquids than your bladder can hold in the morning to flush the alcohol out."

She nods, blinks her eyes open to meet his, and again, as always, finds that there isn't enough oxygen left in her lungs for her to describe how impossibly blue they are.

But, as he starts to get to his feet, she has enough sense, or insanity, or whatever it is, to say, reaching out to him and grabbing his sleeve, "Stay."

He sighs a little at that, and she likes the way his thumb is circling her cheekbone and following the line of her hair, like it's committing her to memory, like he's learning her by heart. She doesn't want him to remind her of her decision, she doesn't want him to point out how she had told him it was for the best, she doesn't want anything that makes sense in the light of day.

But he does. Or at least, he knows she will want all those things, in the morning.

That's why, she supposes to herself as she almost drifts into the darkness of night again, she made the offer at all.

Already, she can feel the sleep creeping back over her senses, as her bed and her blanket and the warmth of him, still lingering in her bones, work their magic.

She's never sure after the fact if he leaned over and whispered _happy birthday_ into her ear, in the same throaty rumble of a voice that had whispered ragged promises she wasn't sure she could believe, that one night amidst the tangle of her sheets when she had allowed herself to fall into the weight and scent and sheer power of him and for a brief, crazy moment, things made sense.

What she's sure of is that he presses a too-quick kiss against her forehead - it's the last thing she remembers before the searing light of day streams into her room and chases the dreams away.


	2. the world that is hers

The car shudders into silence, and she tries - fails - to rub the exhaustion from her eyes with the back of her right hand. She would have stayed later, if not for the worry folded into her mother's voice, _honey, it's your birthday, go home_, so here she is, ever the obedient daughter, home at seven-thirty and at a loss for what to do with the rest of the chill November evening.

She lets herself into the deathly quiet apartment that still smells faintly of its previous owner (catnip and tweed, if tweed had a smell). The painting in the foyer, the polished mahogany end-table, are all hers, of course - carefully chosen in the spare half-hours she had carved out between clinic duty, research, writing papers. But she can't help thinking, as she heads toward the kitchen, that the winter-black shadows bathing her floors should be familiar, should _belong _to her somehow, and yet she still feels like an intruder every time she opens the door.

It's been at least two weeks since her last Safeway run, so she knows that there won't be much in her fridge beyond expired yogurt and unopened packets of cheese that she had surely bought in a fit of ridiculous optimism.

Still, she can't help hoping, against hope and the laws of nature, that there might be something in there to help her take the edge off the past fifteen hours... hell, make that the past fifteen _months_.

Finally, towards the tail end of her search for something vaguely edible, she spots the pale green bottle nestled between a yellowed head of lettuce and some worryingly grey carrots. What possessed her to stash the bottle in the crisper she will never know, but she remembers now the moment, a few weeks ago now, when she had impulsively decided to buy the golden wine, believing against all reason and past experience that she would be able to take the day off just for her, just to relax.

She laughs to herself, at herself, as she digs the corkscrew out from the drawer by the sink, and fusses with the cork in the warm glow of light emanating from the open fridge.

_Why bother with a glass_, she decides recklessly, and asks the chair with mock gravity as she returns to the living room, _who's to know if I become an alcoholic anyway?_ She takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle, and the sour, tart taste hits the back of her throat before it trails a path of buttery fire into her stomach.

As she takes a second swallow, the phone trills merrily, and she groans. She doesn't want to be recalled, not tonight, not at this hour, not ever. She just wants to draw a bubble bath, slide into the warm, welcoming water, sleep, dream.

But her sense of duty - her perverse sense of duty - never slides, nor sleeps, nor dreams. Again, she sighs, tests the weight of the bottle in her hand, and answers the call.

"Dr. Cuddy," she says automatically, and braces herself for the stentorian tones of whichever nurse is on duty, waits to be told that one of her team of doctors is ill or otherwise incapacitated and that she needs to urgently return to Princeton-Plainsboro.

"That would be Dr. Lisa Cuddy, I presume?" comes a familiar male voice, and she marvels that she recognises it through the years and everything else that has come between, "Wouldn't want to waste time that could be spent saving lives speaking to any other Dr. Cuddy."

"Dr. Gregory House," she half-laughs into the receiver, and trails the telephone cord after her as she settles down on the couch and throws the afghan her sister knitted for her last birthday over her legs. "What a surprise."

"Not easy tracking you down," he informs her, and out of nowhere comes a memory of the time he said those same words to her, in a tiny jazz pub miles away from campus, where she had gone to avoid the world. "Took me years to learn to read, and then to spell, and finally to use the Yellow Pages. And I'm darned if after all that effort there weren't ten Lisa Cuddys all living in the New Jersey area."

She does laugh, this time, and remembers the sharp blue of his eyes when he leans over to tell a joke he doesn't expect anyone else to get, the crease in his forehead when she studiously ignores yet another crack that she must have an extra Y chromosome for all the times she's beat him arm-wrestling. "You learnt to read for me?" she teases back, knowing that she is flirting barely five minutes into the conversation and almost thankful that she still remembers how. "I'm touched. The most I ever did for you was take part in that wet T-shirt contest in college."

"Literacy is a small price to pay for all the excellent dreams I've had about that one shining moment," he quips, and she smiles, takes another sip of wine. She's forgotten what it's like to talk to someone outside of what is now her world, someone who doesn't always want something from her, or need something from her, someone who knew her before the hospital became her life. Someone who knew she _had _a life, before the hospital.

"Well, since you've only just acquired the ability to read," she continues, "I now understand why you've never written, or even sent a card. But to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?"

She thinks back to the last time they met, maybe three years ago now, for a quick drink at Fleming's. He had been dressed as he had always dressed - in a scruffy T-shirt, stone-washed jeans from his university days, a motorcycle helmet painted a brilliant blue and orange at his elbow. They had traded stories of their housemanships over a couple of beers and a basket of chips, and he had smiled that sardonic smile of his after he'd pried an admission from her that there was still no one in her life, as he put it, _celebrating the fact that you really are a woman after all_. _Good_, he had informed her calmly, as he tilted his head back and dropped a chip in his mouth, _proves I spoiled you for all other men and you'll never have a healthy, functional relationship again_. She had thrown a chip in his face and, as maturely as she knew how, stuck her tongue out at him. _Behaviour well befitting a future dean of medicine_, he admonished her, and she remembered flushing at the compliment he never really gave her, because Gregory House had never really complimented anyone in his life.

"Just wanted to see how my little foal is getting on in the big, crazy world of professional doctoring," he replies, and clearing his throat, adds, "I read about your appointment as Dean of Medicine."

She's flushing again, fully aware that the warmth in her cheeks that is slipping down her neck and pooling in her belly has little to do with the wine in her system. It thrills her a little to think that he must still look out for her name in medical bulletins and journals, that, once in a while, he remembers being the bemused TA to a fiery nineteen-year-old hellbent on becoming the best female doctor America had ever seen. She had been so _young _then.

"You did, huh?" she asks, and knows that she is glowing. She doesn't need him to tell her she's doing well, she knows it's worth it, all the hard work, the stress, the fatigue, the fighting face she has to put on everyday as she deals with skeptics, men and women alike, who never believe she has the right or ability to be where she is now.

But sometimes it's harder to remember all that. Sometimes she wants to throw in every towel she's got, to hide in a corner in a world that doesn't constantly remind her of the expectations she has yet to surpass, of the glass ceilings she has yet to break through.

"You did good, Dr. Cuddy," he informs her now, more seriously than she has ever remembered him being, "I wanted to let you know that."

She blinks hard against the sudden swell of salt in her eyes, and is about to attempt a response through the lump in her throat, when he says, "Lisa, you know Stacy Hudson, don't you? You met at a benefit some years ago, and she says she's seen you on the conference circuit a couple times since."

Surprised, she pauses for a few moments before she says, tentatively, "I... yeah, I remember Stacy - she's a partner in that legal practice down by Fourth and..."

"Got it in one," he cuts her off, "let me pass the phone to her. She's the one who saw your name in the university gazette."

The sound of fumbling, whispers and a low laugh, and an unfamiliar voice cuts into her ear. "Lisa, I just had to call and congratulate you, but Greg wouldn't hear of it. He said he had to call you first, for old times' sake."

There is a quiet, confident joy in Stacy's voice that she hasn't heard before, not all the brief times they had met, not the one time they met for lunch and never discussed the fact that they both knew a man with impossibly blue eyes and rough hands lined with wistful, smoky jazz.

"Listen, we're on the way out so can't talk for much longer. But I'll call your assistant one day and we'll have lunch, okay?"

She barely has a chance to say anything more than _thank you_ and _that's nice of you_ (and not aloud, _how long have you been with him_), before Stacy disappears, and again it's his voice rumbling down the line.

"I know you, Lisa Cuddy," he tells her, before muffling his next words - _I'll be right there_ - with his hand, "you're working sixty-hour days, saving the world, sticking it to the man, eating next to nothing. Don't kill yourself before I learn how to write."

It takes more of an effort than she thought it would to laugh through gritted teeth, but she does, and she dashes the itch from her eye before she chirps in as bright a voice as she can still find inside her, "I'll be fine. And breathlessly awaiting the day you can manage cursive."

"Perfect," he says, and she can tell he's grinning, even as Stacy runs her hand through his hair, or throws him his coat, or playfully tries to pry his fingers from the receiver. "I might actually write you a card some time, when I've figured out the intricacies involved in using a pen. Congratulations again, Dr. Cuddy. Chug a keg or two for me."

A click, the line dies, and she sighs.

The bottle of wine in her hand has gone warm, and the weight of the life she had chosen has returned, settled like a layer of fine dust over the furniture that is hers but never feels like hers. The world has moved on around her, she knows, and the world that is hers will still be there in the morning.

That night, she dreams of autumn leaves and Miles Davis and a sky the blue of her youth.


	3. surely it can't hurt

He rests his coffee cup on the counter as Brenda amasses a stack of pink and blue and red files, and checks his watch - he's on time for the ridiculously early morning shift, way too early by his usual schedule, but it's one of those days when the hum of her breathing as she sleeps next to him is oppressive, suffocating.

So he escapes, to the clinic, to nameless faces distracted by their own pain and badly in need of his help, and it has to be enough.

Besides, he thinks, as he accepts the stack of files and smiles at the stone-faced nurse who's just waiting to go off duty, he hopes to catch Cuddy on her way in, to wish her a happy birthday. He's not sure if anyone else knows that she turns thirty-five today, and whether they can even make the time to care as they deal with their lives, their jobs and the people bleeding and crying and hurting in the front room.

Well, he can try, at least. That's all he's ever done.

She breezes in through the doors then, a blast of energy like coffee shot straight into a vein, her armour ready, her warpaint on, her chin tilted with that edge of determination he knows must have made her a difficult child to care for.

"Good morning, Dr. Wilson," she smiles at him, and he marvels again that, in the years he's known her, he's only seen that confidence crack once, and even then he had only guessed at the tears hidden in the rigid way she held her shoulders and clenched her fists, the night that Stacy signed her name to a procedure that would change all their lives forever.

Her files are already stacked on the counter - the nurses have learnt her habits and preferences well - and she flips quickly through them. She scrawls her signature across some of the papers, murmurs quick instructions and then turns to him. "You're in early today."

"Clinic," he says, indicating his own batch of cases, people indexed, their illnesses ready to be diagnosed and filtered into statistics she'll have to analyse at the end of every financial quarter, "as and when I can squeeze in the extra hours."

She smiles, almost gratefully, the hospital is her baby after all. "Now if only you can get House to do the same." There is laughter in her words, but resignation and frustration too; and, for a moment, he sees stress and exhaustion and the sheer weight of House threaded through the lines of her face. He recognises them, in the creases in his own forehead and around his eyes, in the frown line next to his mouth he had mistakenly attributed to his first divorce. To these she adds guilt, he knows, and that's more than enough a burden for anyone to carry.

"Cuddy," he starts, and wonders if maybe he should have bought chocolates on the off chance she's not on a diet and it might put a smile on her face, "I wanted to..."

She cuts him off, not rudely, but because her cell phone is ringing, and she sighs. "It's six-thirty in the _morning_," she grumbles as good-naturedly as the situation allows, and to him, "I'll talk to you later?" An apologetic smile, and she turns towards her office, already talking, arranging an appointment or fielding a prank call from House.

It's a little past lunchtime when he finally comes up for air, a stack of files - people he's grown to know, people he'll watch die over the coming months - in his out tray. It must be House's day off, he realises, since it's almost one in the afternoon and there hasn't yet been an eruption into his room from the balcony of a lanky, battered body demanding crankily to be fed.

There is stress involved in being House's friend, he thinks, as he heads to the cafeteria and picks up two sandwiches. He grabs a salad too, for good measure, as he wonders how much more difficult it must be for Cuddy, to be House's friend and boss at once, to care and to hurt and to worry while she tries to justify his existence on her payroll, as she covers up the messes that inevitably explode around the lives he deigns to save.

He raps on her door, one sharp knock, then another, and lets himself in. She's typing up a storm as he walks to her desk, and she looks up, first apologetically, then gratefully, as she realises that he brings her sustenance.

"Excellent timing," she says, emphatically hitting her faded 'enter' key, then bestows on him a smile so dazzling he wonders briefly how she's stayed single so long. There should be queues round the block for a chance to kiss this woman to sleep at night and to watch her wake in the morning... objectively speaking, of course.

She accepts a sandwich, waving aside his explanations that one is tuna and the other roast beef, bites into it with gusto after informing him that she doesn't care since she's absolutely starving, and proceeds to distract him with talk of meetings with potential donors, a new oncology lab, and expanding the department that he has only recently taken charge of.

He watches her as she chats animatedly about maybe getting him an assistant, and he can't help thinking, as always, that she talks of her hospital, of her staff, of him, the way she sometimes talks of House, when it's just them, and they're just friends and not colleagues. There is the same light and sparkle in her eyes, the same fire in her voice, shades of devotion and love and obligation and commitment. He remembers the moment he knew she had chosen to believe that there was still something in House worth the effort and the lawsuits and the torture, when she had looked him in the eye, squared her jaw, and said she would offer House a job. He had almost tried to dissuade her, it was insanity to believe that House would do any better at his fifth hospital in as many years since Stacy had left, and she should not have to pick up the pieces of a man who far too frequently delighted in being broken. But she had stood firm, and he had come to understand that only a fool - or House - could say no to her when her eyes flashed in just that way, blue and steel and a lifetime of fighting the odds.

Just as he's about to interrupt her to wish her a happy birthday, the phone rings. She grimaces, swallows, and picks up, and he gets up to leave when she says, "Oh, hi, Mom." But she shakes her head, gestures for him to sit down, and proceeds to conduct a conversation as professionally and succinctly as only a grown child secure in her own life and choices can. He almost envies the way she dispenses quickly with what surely are her mother's well wishes for her birthday, and admires how she summarises her life in a few pithy sentences that clearly satisfy her mother but reveal to him nothing about her that he doesn't already know. And all this as she quickly checks her e-mail and still has the presence of mind to reassure him with a smile that he's not intruding on a family moment.

He quietly finishes his sandwich, and it's only at the very end of the brief conversation, when she flushes and mutters into the phone, _no, Mom, no one new_, that he realises she is in some ways still a disappointment, even with all her successes, that she carries with her also the weight of failure and unfulfilled expectations, despite the lives she has saved and the rules she has redefined and the battles she has won.

"I'm sorry," she says, as she finally puts the phone down, checks her watch, "It took longer to get through the Spanish Inquisition than I thought it would. I shouldn't have made you wait, and thank you for lunch, but I have to run. Board meeting, and then those donors I told you about, and the lawyers after that to discuss House's latest attempt to remove someone's pancreas through their eyes."

"No problem, just glad someone remembered to feed you," he replies, as she sweeps up a stack of files and gives his shoulder a quick squeeze before she leaves the room and all he's left with is the faint scent of lavender blossoms and an uneaten salad.

He doesn't see her for the rest of the day - he's too busy himself, as he occupies his mind and his time with patients, talks them through their grief the best way he knows how, and tries to avoid thinking of strained conversation over a dinner table, and a sorrow he cannot seem to heal no matter what he does.

It's almost nine by the time he shrugs into his coat and prepares to brave the November chill, but he glances into her office on his way out, and pauses. She's not there, though the lights are still on, and he weighs his options. He's already late for dinner, another reason to squabble or not talk or sleep on the couch, so another ten minutes can't really hurt.

He walks to the twenty-four-hour convenience store, and surveys its meagre wares. There's nothing here that really says what she deserves, that sums up a life in the trenches, fighting for people and causes and lives with her own blood and time and tears, but he figures - something is better than nothing. So he selects a rather squashed blueberry muffin from a tray of woeful-looking pastries and pays at the counter.

It's not much, he admits, as he heads back to her office. But he'll leave it on her table, so she'll see it before she goes home. He knows she doesn't need anyone's strength or determination or courage, she has more than enough of her own.

But surely, he thinks, surely it can't hurt for her to know that someone thought of her today.


	4. from walking away

_There are many things James Wilson has never told Gregory House._

_For example, that he hates fish tacos, but eats them anyway because House really likes them, and it's rare to find something that House loves and enjoys in such an unqualified way._

_Or that every time he tells a patient that chemo isn't working, that death is staring them in the face with the pure gold terror of hellfire, he lights a candle for them at home, and leaves it to burn itself down to a puddle of wax and nothingness._

- - - - -

The car shudders to a stop, and Wilson unbuckles his seatbelt.

But House doesn't switch off the engine, he just leaves the car idling. When Wilson reaches to open his door, House holds up a hand in warning - _not yet_ - and turns to stare out the window at the restaurant across the street.

"It's easier to have dinner when we're _in_an actual restaurant, House," Wilson finally says, after two minutes of waiting patiently in the chill that has slipped through the cracks of House's battered car. "Staring at it isn't going to make it sprout legs and come over to you."

House doesn't even acknowledge this comment, he just continues to look out the window, determination threaded through his shoulders, and Wilson imagines that those blue eyes - always focused, even when in pain, even when turned to ice and glass by drugs or alcohol - are narrowed with the ferocity of a falcon seeking its prey.

- - - - -

_There are many things James Wilson has learnt about acceptance after meeting Gregory House._

_For instance, accepting that there is nothing in his life - not his lunch, his money, his choices, his pain - that is safe from the air of persistent curiosity that House carries with him everywhere._

_That gratitude from House will only come when he least expects it - and that it's never in the form of a 'thank you', but more in the way House nods, a thousand words swallowed and sewn into gestures you might miss if you blink._

_That it's a matter of faith that all the strange things House does are always - almost always - done for a reason._

- - - - -

Finally, after a few more minutes of intense staring, House waves a hand in Wilson's direction. "Sandwiches. In the glove compartment."

Wilson blinks, arches an eyebrow, and pops the latch on the glove compartment. Sure enough, there are sandwiches - encased in plastic boxes stamped with the hospital logo - nestled among a tangle of papers, one lonely motorcycle glove with a hole worn through the palm, and a yo-yo.

"So when you said you were buying me dinner, and I asked if you were dying and you said 'yes',_ this _is what you meant by dinner?"

House jerks his chin in a nod, eyes still locked on the window across the street. "If by 'buying', you mean winning a bet with Kutner and making him pay for them."

"I'll have to thank him for this delectable spread," Wilson remarks wryly, wishes again that Amber hadn't gone out of town to visit her parents, and looks at the sandwiches in his hands - at least House remembered he likes roast beef.

"The roast beef is mine, by the way," House adds absentmindedly.

Wilson sighs, and hands it over. "Do I dare ask - what about drinks?"

House throws his long arm behind the headrest, rummages in the backseat for a moment, and drops a worn grey Thermos in Wilson's lap.

"That's mine!" Wilson protests, although he knows that any attempt to suggest boundaries between his stuff and House will always be futile.

"You didn't seem to miss it at lunch today," House shrugs, "At least it's coffee made the way you like it."

- - - - -

_James Wilson learned a long time ago that Gregory House is an ass._

_He has since learnt to take it as a compliment that House only allows himself to be an especially annoying ass to people he likes._

- - - - -

"So we're clearly on some kind of ridiculous stakeout," Wilson continues, taking a halfhearted bite of a tuna fish sandwich. "Who are we stalking? Your high school lab partner who criticised your titration technique? A hooker you forged an unfortunately intimate personal connection with over a five-minute blowjob?"

"Not anyone you know," House lies, so unconvincingly that it's obvious he isn't even trying to hide it.

So Wilson leans over, looks past House and studies through the plate-glass window the profiles of people he doesn't know, as they trade the stories of their lives over glasses of pinot noir and some escargot.

The face he _does_recognise - strong, true, transformed by a smile and the pale orange flicker of candlelight - is Cuddy's.

- - - - -

_There are several things about Lisa Cuddy that James Wilson has always admired._

_The way she does her job, for example - no complaints and no excuses, just does her job as best as she can, all day, every day._

_The way she always sees the person - not the statistic, not the money - in every patient that passes through her hospital's doors._

_  
But most of all, for the way she puts up with House, House who has insulted her, lied to her, made her cry - and yet still respects her, because she deserves nothing less._

- - - - -

"She's on a date," House says helpfully.

At this point, the man sitting across from Cuddy leans in, laughter creasing his face as he lifts his wine glass in a toast; Wilson can't help but notice that the cool amber liquid in the glass seems to list toward her, hostage to her unique brand of gravitational pull.

"I've seen that guy before," House continues, "he visited her at the hospital earlier this week. She left for lunch at 11.45 that day."

"Fascinating," Wilson sighs, and takes a sip of bitter coffee.

"She_never_ goes for lunch at 11.45," House adds, glancing at Wilson for the first time that night. "She's also left the office at six every day this week. She _never_leaves at six."

"How would you know that if you always leave by five-thirty?"

House grunts, good-naturedly for him, "Touché. I do, however, have my sources."

"So Cuddy's having a little _fun_," Wilson says as House reaches over for the cup of coffee and drains it dry, "she deserves it, once in a while."

"Wait, whose side are you on?" House protests loudly, "Did the boobs distract you again? She's the _Establishment_. The Administration. The Bureaucrat. The Hell-Bitch. Evil Incarnate doesn't get to have fun. In fact, she drains all the fun out of life, most of the time. She calls it clinic duty."

"What do they say about believing that you doth protest too much, House?" Wilson comments wryly, "Shouldn't you be pulling her hair and kicking sand in her eyes? I think that's how mature adults are doing it these days."

This time House snorts. "When have you ever known me to be mature?"

- - - - -

_There are moments when James Wilson knows why he has stayed friends with Gregory House throughout the years. _

_Sometimes it's hard to remember, when he discovers House in a hole of his own making (drugs and alcohol leaking from every pore) or when House lashes out (not at anyone but at himself, all claws and sarcasm and self-loathing), and Wilson wonders if there's anything in there worth staying for. _

_But it's all the times that House pretends he doesn't care - pretends so fiercely, so angrily, so quietly - that have kept Wilson from walking away. _

- - - - -

"You stalker," Wilson says - and thinks, _only to House would anyone say that with affection rather than horror_.

"I'm not stalking her," House shakes his head, "_you_are."

"Of course you're - I'm _what_?"

"_You're_stalking her," House replies patiently.

Wilson furrows his brow. "Last I checked I wasn't clinically insane. Not like some other people in this car I could mention."

"I need to know what's going on in there," House continues, again patiently, like he's talking to a child.

"Then go in there _yourself_," Wilson folds his arms across his chest, "It's one thing sitting here in a car being an unwitting accomplice to your creepiness. It's something else entirely to enable you when you're being a jackass."

"Normally I would," House says quietly, and turns to look out the window again, his fingers starting to pick out a restless, drumming rhythm against his thigh.

Wilson follows House's line of vision to catch Cuddy as she reaches across the table, lightly squeezing her companion's fingers with her own, a story of love and quiet happiness written across her face and in her eyes.

He almost feels sorry for House.

"She's used to me disrupting her dates," House finally mutters, "But I can't today."

"What's so special--" Wilson begins, before he remembers his own little tradition with Cuddy, started so many years ago now, the muffin he passed to her in the hallway this morning, and the way she smiled at him, _You know, with every passing year, it gets harder for me to work these calories off_.

"She's happy," House says simply.

"She is," Wilson agrees.

"But I have to know."

"You always do."

Wilson opens his car door, takes a deep breath as November - which started with a surprisingly early frost, this year - wraps itself around him, and he walks across the road into the restaurant.

- - - - -

_There are many things James Wilson has never told Gregory House._

_Sometimes, these are things he doesn't think House deserves to know. House needs humility - he cannot go around expecting the world to bend and twist around him, the world is larger than his ego, even though it never seems that way when sooner or later everything somehow becomes about him._

_So Wilson told Cuddy - don't tell him about the Addison's. And he told Tritter - this is the deal I need you to make. And he told himself - this is for House's good, even though it made his stomach curl into itself like paper curling into a flame._

- - - - -

He introduces himself, a little awkwardly, papering over his presence with the clumsy lie that he's picking up his drycleaning and saw her from across the street and _just wanted to, you know, say hi_.

Cuddy smiles at him, broadly, openly, and he feels that familiar sense of guilt and annoyance that comes from being both House's friend and spy.

"James Wilson," she says, taking his hand and indicating the man across the table from her, "this is Steve - my brother."

- - - - -

_This is one thing James Wilson doesn't keep from Gregory House._

_He does, however, bite his tongue to keep from commenting on the smirk that creeps across House's face, the one that makes House look... well, almost happy, for once._

_House finally starts the car and they pull away from the sidewalk._

_Wilson ends up paying for Chinese takeout._

_This time, he doesn't mind at all._

- - - - -


End file.
